


The Breaking Wheel

by deadsymbolism



Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, F/M, Hal has issues, because it needed to be written tbh, how the hell do you even spell 'Wyndam' anyway?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 21:27:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadsymbolism/pseuds/deadsymbolism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Lady Catherine doesn't die there, in the crumbling shell of the abbey."</p><p>Two chemicals, benign apart, but when thrust together-- they produce an explosion of energy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Breaking Wheel

Lady Catherine doesn’t die there, in the crumbing shell of the abbey. She slips into something like a catatonic state, eyes open but unseeing, the rise and fall of her chest the only thing to tell her from a corpse.

Hal has her men killed so as not to repeat the story of the failure that has taken place. Let the wolves think of her as another casualty of the war. He brings her back to the house to recuperate, though he is not certain she will. There is no precedent for this, and the local coroner they have in pocket says it’s unlike anything he’s ever seen. Hal doesn’t doubt that.

She lies on a bed in one of the many ornate guest rooms, and every day Hal goes and watches for a sign of life. Some days he is there for mere minutes, sometimes he will sit for hours. Guilt is not something he has felt for a very long time now, and it still does not grip him, but he is aware that he has made a grave error. He feels, rather grudgingly, that he does owe her a debt. If nothing else, Lady Catherine Glass, leader of the werewolves, will make a good bargaining chip if necessary. And if he is entirely honest with himself, he is fascinated by her skill and ruthlessness in the course of this war, by her stubborn clinging to life. He wants to understand. It was a shame, he thinks. She would have made an excellent recruit.

One day, a little over three weeks later, he hears a gasp from a few rooms away and puts down his pen. When he enters the room, she is blinking in confusion, breathing rapidly. He approaches the bed. She sees him, narrows her eyes and hisses, “you fucking _bastard_.”

He laughs, delighted.

Hal doesn’t doubt she’d be gone at the slightest opportunity, but she’s still too weak. In the coming days he has a servant feed her broth and help her try to walk, but she has barely any physical strength. It hasn’t dulled her wit, though. Hal will sometimes engage in conversation with her, though it’s mostly insults and threats on her end. He inquires after her health and her response is to unfailingly remind him she wouldn’t be here in the first place if it wasn’t for him. He asks if she wants tea and she tells him to pour the boiling water on his cock.

He hasn’t been this attracted to a woman in a very long time.

Her progress continues, if slowly. Time does not diminish her apparent hatred. The haranguing still does not deter him, or his complacency in the face of it wear her down.

A week or so passes after her return to consciousness, and one night he wakes up suddenly, acutely aware that something is wrong. In a second she is straddling him, a rough stake no doubt fashioned from some chair leg at his chest in a reenactment of their first meeting. His eyes fly open and only extremely well-honed, fast reflexes allow him to catch the stake as she snarls and brings it down.

He twists her hand back and she cries out, tries to land a knee to his groin, but he has the upper hand. Hal uses his weight to roll them over so that she is pinned to the mattress, her wrists held down by his hands on either side of her head. Both of them are breathing heavily, and Hal is rather sorry it isn’t the scenario he’d been hoped would cause such a reaction.

“You’ve made a remarkable recovery, Lady Catherine,” he drawls as she stares daggers up at him. “Imagine, only earlier today you could barely walk across the room without the help of a servant. Truly impressive.”

She laughs, dryly. “A lady must be modest and—“she tries to buck him, unsuccessfully, “--she keeps her secrets close.”

Her head shoots up and smacks straight into his nose and Hal thinks vaguely that he really must learn her preferred techniques as he curses and draws back. Lady Catherine scrambles out from underneath him and grabs him by the windpipe, throws him back down on the bed and pins him in the same fashion he had trapped her.

Straddling him, she raises the stake but Hal sees her stop before he can brace himself. She leans her face close, and this time it is her speaking softly. “You bloody brainless idiot. We could have stopped the Devil _himself_ , if it weren’t for your selfishness. Now you’ve gone and let him loose. I should have expected it. You vampires are hollow shells only concerned with sating yourselves, the lot of you. You Old Ones just have it down to an art.”

Hal grins. “Ah, well, you have us pegged there, Lady Catherine. But did you really believe for a second we could kill the _Devil_? Even if I wasn’t simply a hollow shell concerned only with sating myself, I wouldn’t bet on those odds and I certainly wouldn’t risk my skin for them.”

Her grip on his wrists tightens and she hisses, “You could have fucking tried.”

“Such language from a lady of breeding,” he murmurs. “If I were a different man, that might be unbecoming instead of attractive.” Lady Catherine’s eyes are bright with disdain. Her lips, however, are close, and he brings his head up quickly, captures them in a hard kiss.

She doesn’t draw back immediately, but her grip tightens enough to be painful. Hal takes it, and presses his mouth harder onto hers. She rears back at this, freeing one hand to smack him across the face, forceful enough to draw blood. He licks his own blood away from his mouth and laughs as she watches him.

“Catherine, Kate, Hellcat,” his voice is low and full of lust. “I’ve wanted to do that since I first woke up to you on top of me.”

Her eyes close in frustration. “Lord Hal,” she says slowly, “shut the bloody hell up.”

She grabs his hair and pulls him into a kiss, much more vicious than he would have anticipated, and he can’t help but laugh. She snarls into his open mouth at the interruption, rolls her hips deliberately and his laugh trails into a groan.

His hands free, he grabs her hips in response, grinds them down onto his and though it doesn’t break her concentration, he can feel her shudder. The kiss gets deeper, all tongue and open mouth. When he pulls his body up so that he can feel her right there in his lap, her legs on either side of his, she inhales sharply. His hands tangle in those curls and _Christ_ , she shouldn’t smell this fucking good for a damned werewolf but she does-- all musk and linen and something deep he can’t quite put his finger on.  She breaks the kiss, and in a mocking inversion of the usual vampiric seduction technique, it’s her who kisses down his neck, then his torso, leaving his skin red where her teeth graze. He’s barely holding back his groans when she stops right at his lower abdomen, smiling into it. “Tease,” he pants, without malice.

He can play that game too. His hands move to her thighs, slide the nightgown he’d given her slowly upwards. She watches him, and when he finally runs a finger too lightly along her sex, she makes a sound of sheer frustration. “Hal,” she groans, and hearing his name from her lips like that makes his head spin.

No more teasing, then. He presses inward, and when he gets his finger on her clit she gasps and grinds down. He starts stroking, and she’s biting her lip, trying to keep quiet. He can’t remember the last time he’s been this hard. When another of his fingers presses inside her, she lets a moan through and he marvels at how wet she is. It’s surreal perfection, this entire moment. His other hand moves to pull the nightgown down from her chest, and she helps him. He is entirely unsurprised that she has truly wonderful breasts. When he swipes his tongue over a nipple and presses on her clit at the same time, she sobs. He grins and she stops it with another rough kiss.

Her hands move from where they’ve been gripping the sheets to pull at his trousers, and he lets her do it, never stopping the rhythm of his fingers. As soon as she’s got his cock free, he pulls her on top of him, resting at her entrance.

“Move,” she almost orders, and he obliges gladly, thrusting inside her with a gasp.

“Fuck, Catherine—“ his eyes squeeze shut at how good she feels around him. It’s nothing compared to when she begins moving, rolling her hips and whimpers falling out of her mouth. The angle is wonderful and allows him to pull her down for a kiss and get his thumb back pressing on her clit. As his hips snap harder, she makes these sounds between a moan and a gasp that could turn a priest from God. Hal is definitively _not_ a priest, and he can feel his orgasm approaching quickly. He moves his finger harder, angles his hips with every thrust and when he feels her tighten around him, presses a tiny and gentle kiss to where her neck meets her jaw.

Then she’s coming and crying out his name, over and over, and he can’t possibly last. His vision goes hazy for a split second as he comes, and he struggles to keep his eyes from glazing black. “Catherine,” he cries, and she kisses him, silencing him. It’s undignified but he doesn’t give a damn—he’s not sure of the last time anything felt this good.

She pulls herself off of him, still breathing heavily, and rolls onto her back next to him. His body feels incredibly light, and he runs a finger aimlessly through her dark curls. They are silent for a minute, until Lady Catherine speaks slowly. “Well,” she says, “that was almost certainly a mistake.”

“Enjoy the moment, Lady Catherine. Don’t let something as base as guilt spoil the experience.” He presses a kiss to her neck.

“As if you’d even know what real guilt felt like, Lord Hal,” she retorts, but her eyes are closing. She might have been putting the weak act on a bit, but Hal doubts she’s up to full strength anyway. When her breathing indicates that she has fallen asleep, he allows himself to follow.

Of course, when he wakes up in the morning she is gone. There is no note. She had taken with her the clothing she had come wearing weeks ago and a pristine 18th century hunting sword with sentimental value. The guard at the rear entrance is a pile of dust in the bright French spring day. Hal is furious, and the very fact that he is angry, that he even _cares_ , only makes him more so.

He summons Fergus and they ride into Rouen that night in uniform. Fergus is wise enough not to ask what’s wrong, though it’s clear the other man is in a foul mood. Hal seduces two pretty local nurses out of the British military hospital with awful French affected solely for charm—just last week to a young _mademoiselle_ in a café he was a wealthy Parisian—and Fergus almost feels sorry for the girl Hal chooses. It tends to happen, when Hal gets like this.

Hal licks blood off his fingers later that night and laughs without mirth to himself. _No, Lady Catherine,_ he thinks. _You’ll have to wait quite a while for another one of those pious fucking good spells._

 

The truce with the werewolves holds, tentatively. At the very least, there is no more outright war. But Hal has been fighting wars for a very long time and he knows that animosity bred amongst soldiers towards an enemy is not as easily extinguished as it is kindled-- particularly in the case of vampires and werewolves. The dog fights still go on with impunity. Well-organized werewolves will still occasionally take out individual or small groups of vampires.

Lady Catherine does not disappear off the map, entirely, but she seems to stay low to the ground. Hal continues to keep tabs on her, but makes no move.

Then in 1923, the local vampires of Bruges get stupid and careless. A council meeting turns into a slaughter of an entire village on the outskirts of the city. Not a human soul is left alive. It’s in bad taste, even for the Old Ones—one doesn’t do this sort of thing on a whim. One doesn’t draw this kind of attention. The incident gets blamed on a group of bandits; it was a rather small village, after all, with gold relics said to be hid in the church. If there’s one thing that still surprises Hal about humanity, it’s the size and transparency of the lies they will swallow in order to feel safe.

The Belgian contingent is sorting it out when the message comes in from Brussels. A pack of werewolves has descended, and overnight they slaughtered every vampire in the city. Retribution was heard to be the rallying cry by a lone Brussels delegate who manages to escape. Lady Catherine, he says, is at the head of them.  Idiot youngsters from the surrounding area decide to retaliate and continue to be dispatched. The wolves seem to be aching for the fight.

The situation is getting progressively out of hand and within two days Edgar Wyndam is riding down from Amsterdam with a small battalion of vampires at his back. Hal hears the details later—he is still occupied in France—and he learns this: that the wolves fought with extraordinary ferocity despite inferior numbers, that Lady Catherine herself dispatched at least six vampires before being bested one-on-one by the Old One. Wyndam sends Hal an expedited parcel, containing a lock of curly chestnut hair. He is never sure if it was intended to be a grim confirmation or a mocking reminder. Knowing Wyndam, likely both.

Years later, in late autumn sometime in the mid-30s, Hal and Wyndam meet in Paris for a tedious politics discussion. With business concluded by mid-evening, the two let loose with wine and a pair of junior ballerinas from the Paris Opera Ballet. In the early hours of the morning, his tuxedo jacket and tie discarded, Wyndam lights up a cigarette, picks at his blood-stained shirt, and begins to tell Hal about Lady Catherine’s death.

“I could see what was so intriguing about her, you know. Even for a wolf, it was easy to understand why she caught your eye. I almost didn’t believe the reports until we got there. When I cornered her finally, she tried to blind me by rubbing blood from one of her wounds in my eye…good trick, but she was weakened. She fought like, well, an _animal_ , and laughed like a madwoman the entire time. Surprisingly difficult to kill, in the end. I swear she grinned at me when I finally made the final blow.” He breathes the smoke out through his nostrils, appearing nonchalant, but Hal is very aware that Wyndam is watching his face for a reaction.

Well, Edgar was known for being extremely adept with a rapier. Hal says nothing, lets his face show nothing. When he speaks, his tone is almost bored. “She always was a handful.”

The sun rises and Hal stumbles out into the streets of the Latin Quarter. It’s a cold November morning, and as he passes a church a nun calls out to him in French as she gives out alms to the homeless on the steps. He must look a fright. Perhaps there’s still blood on his rumpled tuxedo.

“ _Monsieur_ , come repent your sins. Today is the holy feast day of that most blessed martyr, St. Catherine,” she cries.

Hal stares at her for a moment and then simply walks on. 

**Author's Note:**

> If I didn't write this it was going to eat at me, eternally. (I say that like I don't have two other fics in progress for this series already.) 
> 
> -The Breaking Wheel is a reference to the torture device St. Catherine was martyred upon, and it seemed pretty apt. Her feast day is, in fact, November 25th and she's a big deal to a lot of Catholics and Orthodox followers.  
> -All apologies begged for any random Americanisms I missed.  
> -I am literally incapable of not fleshing out place and location in stories. Especially those set in France, oops.  
> -I've also realized I've totally misspelled Wyndam's name, which I've now gone back and fixed. I just assumed for some reason it was WyndHAM and had to look up the spelling on IMDB. Ooooops.


End file.
